Babies can be evil little creatures: they can even fake cry

According to researcher Hiroko Hakayama—who filmed babies in their homes for an hour each day, twice a month for six months—some babies do, in fact, “fake” cry to get attention. Over the course of the videos, the vast majority of the babies' cries were real. Hakayama determined that by looking at what happened just before and just after the crying episode. When the baby “displayed negative affect almost always just before starting to cry and soon after crying terminated,” Hakayama concluded that it was a real cry. But when the baby followed up crying immediately with a positive signal, like laughing or smiling, Hakayama concluded that they were faking the cry to get attention.
 And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.